Staggering to my feet, I shook my head in an attempt to clear it, but the edges of my field of mage sight vision were starting to blur. My opponent laughed at me, a tittering, horrid snorting sound, and with a contemptuous bow, backed away and indicated I should come forward and claim my weapon. Great, now he’s just toying with me. Taking advantage of my foe’s apparent temporary good nature, I hobbled forward slower than necessary, stalling for time. Oddly, now I was starting to feel really chilly. The little voice in the back of my head that remembered healing was screaming something important at me, but I was too tired to listen. Picking up my war hammer, which was starting to feel heavy, I reset and faced the beast. I took a deep, grating, painful breath and nodded at him. Through mutual agreement, we decided this would be the last round.
He charged, with my last ounce of reserve speed, I dodged around him and sprinted away from the beast, pulling up lame in front of the largest flat wall of solid rock in the arena area. Grabbing my hamstring, I hoped my acting skills were better than my energy levels. Again, I saw the semblance of an evil smile cross the bovine features of the bull as he pawed the ground, lowered his head, snorted, and launched himself at me with everything he had. This creature was amazingly fast, but more than an hour of sparring with him gave me the insight I needed to time things perfectly. A shoulder feint and a backward, falling dive allowed me to avoid his charge. Again he had counted on hitting me and so was taken off guard when he crashed into the solid rock wall headfirst, shaking the ground beneath our feet violently.
“Oh, come on…really?” Was he dead? No, of course not, just pissed…and also stuck deeply into the rock face. Bellowing madly, he thrashed from side-to-side in an attempt to free himself.
I had executed the backward dive flawlessly but at the expense of even more damage to my ribs, and the tunnel vision I was experiencing was getting markedly worse. Using what little strength I had remaining, I brought my war hammer down in a two-handed overhead smash to his thick skull. It snapped both horns off, still embedded in the rock. He dropped face down, slightly dazed for a moment. Not wasting any time, I struck another hard blow to the rock face, shattering it into several chunks and freeing the two broken horns. Snatching up one of them, I drove the horn tip into the back of the beast, about where the heart would be on a human. Swinging the hammer, I attempted to drive the broken horn deeper, but my failing strength and vision wouldn’t let me hit the target; I missed again and again. By this time, the beast was shaking its head back and forth and trying to leverage itself back up on its knees.
Tossing my hammer aside, I brought both my fists together and brought them down onto the horn, slamming them down again and again with my last desperate vestige of strength, practically collapsing on the bull’s back. I think it was more the weight of my armor than anything I did that finally drove the horn deep enough into its thick torso to bring up a satisfying gout of foul black, greasy blood that spread across the arena floor. My chest landing on the horn end made my ribs feel like someone had dumped red hot forge irons into my ribcage. The loud steady heartbeats, which had been sounding like a drum throughout the battle, were receding and becoming irregular and pitifully weak.
Staggering back from the demon, I picked up the other horn, swaying drunkenly on my feet. I held it out in front of me like some kind of curved dagger in the event it looked like the creature was healing this damage as well. But after a few quivers, the demon’s skin started to crack and dry, then dissolved into reddish flakes of ash. The molecules spread by the hot wind into the lava and sucked down into the flows. I stood there for a moment, not entirely sure what had just happened. The next thing I knew, I was falling, my back hitting the rock face where I slid down hard into a seated position just as my field of vision went completely blurry, then spun lazily, and finally faded to black. As my heart slowed to a near stop, I think I might have dreamed of unicorns.
……………………………………………
Maya
The sun was halfway to its zenith on a day that I had never envisioned happening, a day without Alex! This isn’t how things were supposed to happen; I am the fragile mortal being! All this time since meeting his parents, I had imagined myself years from now dying an old, shriveled-up elf woman in a soft bed in a large brightly lit room filled with solemn children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And there would be Alex, sweetly, gently cradling my head, still looking as young and hale as the day I met him. A last, simple kiss goodbye and I could drift off into the end having lived a life and loved a man like no other. Damn it, I was supposed to go first!
The girls had hastily made a small camp outside the back entrance of the cave since no one really wanted to relive the carnage inside over and over again. And at least outside, there was fresh untainted air. The vampires were all dead, at least the ones not under Belrothe’s protection, and I might have taken out a couple dozen of those by accident, I couldn’t be sure at this point. I really don’t remember much past the amulet incident and Winya’s constant yelling in my mind. I essentially turned off our link and became the bloody harvester of the undead; I suppose I have Portia’s dreams to thank for that. When I regained sanity, the carnage was appalling even by my dream standards; I didn’t just kill them, I made them unrecognizable as ever having been human. Still it did nothing to make me feel better. I gather by the fearful looks and the muffled whispering of my companions that they were too frightened of me to even venture back into the cave. Instead, they sent Reginaldo in to carry me physically out of the bloody abattoir.
I sat on a log staring into the campfire, oblivious to the activity around me. In front of me, hanging from a branch driven into the ground, was the amulet that had caused all this trouble. I hated looking at it, yet it was the last object my lost lover had touched and so it held a certain sad fascination for me as well. My mind reeled from the enormity of it all; I was adrift, no direction, even the thought of continuing on to the dark elf capital seemed without value. I was truly undone and alone.
Belrothe had, of course, left before dawn with her entourage of vampires she thought she could rehabilitate. I could also tell she needed to visit Riverfield and see for herself. There were a couple of times before she departed that it looked like she wanted to come up and say something to me. But her own personal grief, combined with the mad slaughter she had witnessed, was probably too much for even a 1200-year-old being to comprehend and deal with. Her human liegemen were still bustling around the area, however, feeding and readying the last of the farmers for transport back to their homes. Even more wagons had shown up recently to transport the greater numbers of captives back to their villages. From the shouts of joy and laughter I heard, it sounded like we had saved them all, except for Bel’s family, that is.
I heard a buzzing sound, and Nia flew up and gently hugged my face before she settled on my shoulder. She looked exhausted and completely wrung out from crying. I noticed a pair of sad-eyed druids shuffle up and sit down dejectedly on a nearby log. They had been moving back and forth on the periphery of my vision for some time now, trying to gather the courage to speak to me. Their young minds struggled to reconcile the dark elf sitting before them in silence with the berserker who stalked the cavern last night steeped in blood.
“What do we do now, Maya? Shouldn’t we look for Alex?” Lin whispered, eyeing me cautiously, keeping herself between my sword arm and Jules.
I continued to watch the fire, willing it to spread out of its containment and burn the world down to a blackened cinder. Instead, I managed a hollow answer for them, not bothering to look at them. “Believe this, if Alex was anywhere on this planet, I would run, walk, or crawl on my knees to reach him. But Winya says he is not; she believes he was dragged into Hell itself.”
“But surely the Nova must be able to find him!”
“Perhaps, but in all the legends, I have never heard of anyone returning and the Nova are forbidden from interfering. In any case, Rosa knew the moment it happened, and the
way they watch us, so did the Nova. You can believe if there was a way to bring him back, his parents would be here right now and damn the rules or consequences! But it’s been half a day and nothing…just nothing.”
I shifted uneasily on my log seat, silently cursing what I was about to do, but I had no stomach for tact, or even life itself at the moment, as I continued, “I am a warrior, I have seen hundreds of comrades fall in battle and, in the end, only the mission and the damn memories remain. There is nothing to be gained by dwelling on what we cannot change. Tomorrow, you girls will take the warhorses back to Sky Raven. I tied Alex’s shield back onto Somnus’s saddle, and you will need to see that the horse and shield are returned to Oreale. Humans place great importance on this custom of returning the shields of the fallen. Afterwards, you will return to your studies. Nia, you will be going with them; you are still listed as a student. There are many things that Rosa can still teach you about being a wizard, and you have your people’s future to think about.”
“Aren’t you coming with us, Maya?” Jules whimpered softly as Lin wrapped an arm around her for comfort.
“No,” I said tonelessly. “I will continue on to warn my people and fight by their side to the end. If I should survive, I will secure the magic stone from the dark elves and bring it to Sky Raven in the hope that we can still use it to restore magic to the world. Hopefully, Darroth can do the same with the dwarves.”
There was a soft thud of footsteps behind us, and the girls whipped around to see Kaima and Somnus standing there, heads down, flames at the lowest level I had ever seen, as if joining in our sorrow. Lin got up and took their reins and walked them back to the grassy area where she’d had them tied up to graze. Securing them again, she walked back and sat down exhausted with the rest of us.
We sat there for a long time, each lost in our own thoughts, no one speaking a word, just gazing into the slowly dying fire. I threw more wood on the flames and watched it catch and flare up.
This time, I wasn’t even surprised when the familiar thud of heavy hooves moved steadily up behind us again. Lin raised Jules head off her shoulder and glared at the Vakhas over my shoulder.
“That’s the third time I’ve tied those two up,” she muttered. “I don’t know why I even bother.”
Suddenly, Somnus threw up his head as if he had heard something and snorted out a puff of blue flame, his eyes fixated on the amulet draped over the stick by the fire.
Lin jumped up and ran to the horse, rubbing her hands over his head and tilting her head as if listening.
“He’s refusing to talk to me again,” Lin complained, as the huge horse started walking right past her and closer to the fire, still staring at the amulet hanging from the branch. “Hey, buster, now is not the time to get all holier-than-thou on us about the amulet…hey, where are you going? I swear you should have been born a donkey; at least you would have had a clear conscience for being an ass!”
Somnus stopped and swung his great white head in an arc toward the druid and sneezed. A gout of snot and icy blue flame caught her right between the eyes and dumped her on her backside in the dirt.
Wiping her face, a very angry Lin catapulted up from the ground and stomped her foot. “Hey now, that was just rude!”
The Vakha whinnied a horse laugh and continued his slow calculated march toward the fire and the amulet. Reaching it, he stopped and brushed his nose on the metal as if tasting its magic. With another snort, the flame level on his hooves and mane increased tenfold and soon blue flame was running across his entire body. We all leaned back as he became a four-footed inferno of blue flame; you couldn’t see his coat anymore as it was all flame. Finally, he touched his nose to the amulet again and the flames seemed to jump across and set the metal itself on fire!
“Somnus, stop it!” Julia screamed, but the great horse would have none of it. He backed up a few steps, snorted out another puff of blue smoke, reared, and charged toward the amulet. Amazingly, the blue flames on the amulet widened in a large circle as the warhorse approached. As he entered the ring, Somnus reached out and snagged the amulet off the branch with his massive teeth, pulling it and himself through the portal just before the fire extinguished and the portal snapped closed, leaving only a hint of icy blue smoke wafting in the still morning air.
“Great, now I can’t even return his shield to his mother,” I whispered, wondering why the Vakha had acted so strangely.
We all sat there dumbfounded for a short while, unsure if we were waiting for the Vakha to return or if he was lost as well. Both druids grilled poor Kaima about Somnus’s behavior, but he apparently didn’t bother to tell her anything either, and she returned to grazing nonchalantly in the long grasses.
Finally, I could wait no longer; my people had to be warned of the impending invasion. I packed a few essentials in a shoulder bag, barked my last instructions, and awkwardly hugged all three girls one last time before I set out across the fields in the direction of my home. I had made it a scant couple hundred yards when Winya broke through my mental barriers with one word, “Alex!”
……………………………………….
Alex
For the four hundredth and sixteenth time, I paced off the distance between the walls of Hell’s arena and assessed my situation. For months, I have analyzed the magic of this place and have finally come to the conclusion that demon magic is not like enchanter magic and is, therefore, beyond my understanding. There is nothing here like the matrix I found in the wizard’s arena that I could manipulate; it just is. When I finally woke up after my fight with the demon, I was still slumped up against the rock wall, horn still in my hand, a complete mess both inside and out. The first day or two, I was concerned that replacement challengers might appear to fight me again. But there had been nothing, and while I feel the pain of thirst and hunger, my body doesn’t seem to be wasting away, either. All of the wounds I received from the demon have, in fact, fully healed in time. So I have come to theorize that this place is not really Hell but some sort of a testing arena between Heaven and Hell. Perhaps the home team, in this case the demons, get to set the game parameters. But, as there is no way to prove this idea, I may never know. I frequently examined the second remaining horn from the demon but it yielded no insights, nor did it seem to be any sort of key to escaping this plane.
It’s still very hot, and I have experimented with taking off all my armor, some of the armor, or just leaving it on. Surprisingly, as long as I am not doing anything strenuous, I am more comfortable in the armor than out; usually I go without the helm, though. There is no morning, day, or night in this place, but I force myself to spend at least half my time trying to devise a way to get back home. The other half of my time, I allow myself the pain of thinking about my friends who I may never see again and, of course, Maya. Memories are both a blessing and a curse in this dimension, and I relive every conversation I ever had with my dark elf beauty in vivid detail. Sometimes, if I linger too long in memories, the pain becomes unbearable...so I sleep whenever possible.
When you have months with absolutely nothing to do but think, time weighs heavily on a person. I will admit the thought of just walking out into the lava flow and ending it all held some initial attraction, but I had to believe in my parents’ story about the threads of fate and how mine and Maya’s were intertwined. I was determined that I would not be the one responsible for breaking our thread, not now, not ever.
I was in the middle of a dream about Maya; she was so beautiful, so amazing with her light purple skin and curly silver hair. At the moment, she was nuzzling my neck, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and gave her a gentle kiss. I was puzzled though; for some reason her skin and hair were cold. In the middle of our lovemaking, she nickered loudly, a sound I don’t think I’ve ever heard her make before. Feeling odd, I opened my eyes, and a huge snout was blocking most of my vision. Startled, I backed up and banged my head on the rock face I was leaning against.
“Ouch…Somnus?” I aske
d, rubbing my head and wondering at the same time if this was the same dream or if I was dreaming about dreaming again. Well, either way, I’m awake now. I slowly got up, retrieved and clipped my helm to my belt and stretched nonchalantly. Cautiously, out of the corner of my eye, I checked to see if the apparition of my horse was still there, and he was. Next, I looked around the very familiar vista of the arena - yup, it still looked like Hell to me. All the while Somnus was getting impatient, stomping around as if he had somewhere to go. He kept going over to a small ledge in the rock face where I had killed the demon. Walking over, I noticed something unusual; it was the amulet I took from Kotoch!
“Somnus, did this bring you here?” He nodded, swinging his huge head up and down. “Can we use it to get back?” Another nod and suddenly his blue flames intensified, like a blacksmith had suddenly pumped up the bellows on a kiln. He twisted his head around and lowered his back for me to swing up and into the saddle, my leg colliding with my shield tethered to the other side. I quickly stuffed my trophy demon horn in a saddlebag, secured my hammer in its sheath, and slid my helm on. A few moments later, a large blue portal opened up in the middle of the rock wall before us, and as we plunged through, I remembered to snatch the amulet off the ledge and hold it tight. For a brief moment, I felt like we were in the blackness of space, that cold area between the warmth of stars and the imagination of men.
We blasted out of thin air, stomping right through a burning fire pit causing a huge shower of sparks and ash to cascade into the morning air. Somnus vaulted over a fallen log and I saw a couple of girls in travel clothes dive to either side to avoid the juggernaut. Once clear of obstructions, Somnus swung around and came to a complete stop, allowing me to slide off. I dropped to my knees and threw off my gauntlets and helm, reaching my hands into the cool damp grass, laughing like the village idiot - I was home!
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